Preface

This is the fourth
volume in a continuing series designed to introduce recent studies on Japanese
religion to the international English-speaking audience. The three earlier
volumes were Matsuri, New Religions and Folk Beliefs in Modern Japan. For the fourth volume, we selected
the concept of kami as the theme.

While Shinto is normally categorized as a form
of polytheism, the concept of kami,
which is one of the core concepts of Shinto, is quite complicated, so much so
that even most Japanese do not grasp it fully. For example, the kami which are systematically compiled
in classical documents like Kojiki
and Nihon Shoki are different from
the gods venerated by people in their daily life. In other cases, kami have been compounded with the
buddhas and boddhisattvas of Buddhism throughout the course of Japanese
history.

In this volume, we collected five essays
originally published in Japanese, hoping that they will provide readers with
various dimensions of the concept of kami
in Japan. Editor Inoue added an original essay as the introductory chapter, in
order to help clarify the general structure of discussions in this book, and
translator Havens provided a closing essay in which he discusses various
aspects of the kami concept,
particularly in relation to its role in the process of religious legitimation.

Itô Mikiharu's paper discusses the issue of how
the concept of kami evolved. He
refers to a hypothesis that the concepts of chi,
mi, and tama took shape together with the concept of kami. He also discusses the integration of kami and coexistence of plural deities. Regarding the relationship
between kami and tama, he refers to the thesis of Orikuchi Shinobu, who claimed that
although tama was originally an
abstract entity, it came to be viewed as having the two aspects of good and
evil, namely kami and mono. Itô has provided a general
overview of the historical integration of kami,
and way in which the the concept of oyakami or "parent kami" developed.

Matsumura Kazuo's paper focuses on female
deities in Japanese myths. On confirming that the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki
possess no stories independent from foreign myths and share many elements in
common with them, he tries to analyze the unique character of Amaterasu who is, of course, one of the
most important deities in Japanese myths.

Matsumura concludes that Amaterasu does not reflect the popular conception of an age in
which females wielded actual political power, but was depicted as a symbol for
the purpose of displaying the orthodoxy of male political powers.

Ueda Kenji's paper discusses various theological
issues in Shinto studies, especially concerning the "kami of evil," based primarily on the theories of Motoori Norinaga,
the famous Tokugawa-period scholar of Nativism (Kokugaku). After denying the view that Motoori was the first
proponent of a theory of Magatsubi nokami as a kami of evil, Ueda analyzes Moroori's discussion of Magatsubi no kami carefully, pursuing it in the effort to make clear how Motoori
desired to deal with the problem of "evil." While admitting that Motoori
presupposed the existence of a kami
of evil, Ueda places stress on the fact that good and evil are mutually
relative in Shinto. Ueda concludes that the divine will was not the will of an
absolute god, but should be interpreted as the august will of the collective kami of heaven, as the core nature of
Shinto.

Sasaki Kiyoshi's paper deals with concepts of kami
held by famous Nativist scholars, focusing primarily on Hirata Atsutane and his
followers' ideas of kami. It has been
claimed by some scholars that Hirata was strongly influenced by the Christian
concept of a supreme being when he established his own concept of kami. After considering this theory,
Sasaki closely scrutinizes the kami
concept as held by Nativist scholars of the Hirata school at the end of the
Tokugawa era, in the effort to determine whether they were indeed influenced by
the Christian idea of God.

Inoue Nobutaka's paper discusses the concept of kami held by Sano Tsunehiko, founder of
the religious groups Shinrikyô. Shinrikyô was one of the bodies of sectarian
Shinto in the prewar period, located in the Northern part of Kyushu. Most of
the group's members continue to live in Kyushu today. Sano was educated as a
doctor around the end of the Tokugawa era, but decided to become a Shinto
priest out of his fear that Christianity would overwhelm Japan, thus
establishing the sectarian Shinto group Shinrikyô. Sano drew a number of "Shinri-zu" in order to provide simple
explanations of the work of kami and
the relationship between kami and
human beings. His activities and claims can be considered typical for sectarian
Shintoists in the Meiji era.

In the volume in this series, we are planning to
present a series of articles dealing with Japanese views of death.

As always, I would like to express my deep
gratitude to Mr. Havens for his work on these translations, together with my
thanks to Mr. Timothy Kelly for assisting with the English on my introductory
paper.

In closing, I like to note that IJCC now has a
home page on the Internet where readers can find electronic versions of the
entire texts of the first three volumes in this series, as well as our Shinto
glossary, Basic Terms of Shinto. Set
your browser to the following URL: